<>p>MS announced this week that IE7 will be pushed as a high-priority update, so we can expect it to be popular pretty quickly. Reader Shawn Lauriat brought our attention to the question: How native is IE7′s XMLHttpRequest?

The IE team have promoted the new IE7 as including native XMLHttpRequest. This is the case, insofar as you can instantiate an XHR using new XMLHttpRequest(). More importantly than the syntax, XHR will still work when ActiveX has been disabled (unlike IE6 and below).

On the other hand, Shawn notes that some issues exist. Some have pointed out that its more of a native facade than a native Javascript object. Specifically:

It’s also worth pointing out that IE has an option to disable native XHR. (Aside: can we switch to positive terminology already – “enable” rather than “disable” … it’s hardly a secret of HCI that options should be stated in the positive :-/). The XHR option is, reasonably enough, motivated by security. Although it sounds like XHR will default to enabled (sorry, “not disabled”), it’s still a reality that some users will be continue to be lost if you rely on XHR. Don’t throw out that IFrame just yet!

I definitely wouldn’t say to keep or start using iframes, but I do think people should keep in mind that if MS says “native support” they don’t actually mean “native” as in a “native JavaScript” object.

You know, I wouldn’t even care if they just stole everything from Firefox. But they have to wait for years, finally steal it, break it, and then put it in a release while pretending they came up with it on their own.

If they would just steal it outright, we would at least have something closer to consistency and ease of development.

[...] Michael Mahemoff at Ajaxian addresses the issue of native XMLHttpRequest support in IE 7. The IE 7 team has repeatedly stated, with relative fanfare, that the new browser will include native XMLHttpRequest. But, as Michael points out, the question remains: just how native is this native XMLHttpRequest [...]

hi i am running my asp.net ajax application in windows 2003 server with iis6 but everything is working fine in all the browsers but i am getting following error in Internet Explorer 7….

MissingMethodException: Method not found

any help?.

thanks in advance.

Yoganand

Comment by Rahul — February 13, 2007

IE7 has a nice little feature that disables posting silently to iframes (using client side scripting) too – so you probably wouldn’t even find the error for weeks. Iframes aren’t a solution. Kicking Bill Gates squarely in the knackers should be considered.

Hai friends i have done a site in AJAX.It works well except IE7.
Even in IE 7 onload i am calling a file through ajax its working well.But if i fire another event in ajax ,its not functioning.Ajax request is sent to server successfully.But response is not coming from server.Any one help me please? advance thanks!

Comment by Siva — May 4, 2007

Nothing can be as good as Fire Fox at least I never loose my connection like IE7 has been doing me. It’s frustrating but I know the anwer is near. I hope!